In the recent past, portable digital devices such as personal digital assistants (PDA) have been widely used. To send some information to a user of the portable digital device, unlike a fax machine, the information is directly transmitted to the portable digital device for locally storing before printing it with a local printer. The user having the received information must first find a local printer. Furthermore, for some certain formatted information, the user must run an application program on the portable digital device in order to print the received information.
Japanese Patent Publication Hei 10-191453 discloses a personal handy phone system (PHS)-based method of locally printing information that has been originally inputted through a portable digital assistant (PDA). The disclosure is limited to the information that was inputted only by the PDA. To print the information, the location of the PDA is transmitted to a PHS service center via a PHS base station, and the nearest print station is determined based upon the PDA location. The information to be printed is transmitted to a selected nearest print station either through the service center or directly from the PDA. Hei 10-191453 also discloses the use of a password to identify a bona fide user as well as a fee to be charged to a user for the local printing at predetermined locations such as a convenient store. Furthermore, the prior art reference discloses certain location-dependent parameters for the print stations, and the parameters include the printing fee amount and hours of operation.
Japanese Patent Publication Hei 8-137776 discloses an infra-red (IR) based transmission method of locally printing information as specified by a token stored in a portable digital device. IR is limited to a substantially single direction as well as a transmission distance and capacity. A predetermined number of computers, printers and other peripheral devices is placed at predetermined locations of rooms in a building and is networked by a conventional cable. At least one IR receiver/transmitter is placed in each of the rooms and is shared among the computers, the printers and other peripheral devices in the same room via the network. Thus, when a user moves from one room to another, the portable digital device communicates to a corresponding one of the printers in the room via the IR receiver/transmitter for local printing. The disclosure is unclear as to where computation or processing takes place for the tasks that have been initiated during the communication.
Japanese Patent Publication Hei 11-191081 discloses a transmission method of printing information stored in a network by specifying a task and a file identifier from a portable digital device. The portable digital device transmits the above file and task specification to a host system that is connected to a host of devices such as a printer, a fax machine and a workstation. Upon receiving the file and task specification, the host system in turn processes the tasks on the file. One of the tasks is to print a specified file at a specified printer. The host system and the portable digital device are designed to handle data in multimedia including audio, video, graphics and hand-written information. The prior art disclosure limits the above described communication to only between the portable digital device and the host system.
The above described prior art systems do not allow direct communication between the portable digital device and the peripheral devices such as a printer prior to printing information. Although it makes sense to store the information to be printed at any location, it is desired that the communication between a print station and a portable digital device should be direct.